Survival and capitalism collide: investing in climate adaptation
I'm back to the topic that got me curious about climate tech in the first place; also, big dreams in the battery world, and a detour into surrealist art.
This week on Everybody in the Pool
Climate adaptation is, and always has been, a complicated topic. Those who’ve been following me for a while will know that climate adaptation was the thing that got me interested in climate technologies in the first place.
When I wrote about it for Wired in 2019, I said it wasn’t surrender, it was survival. To my northern plains, practical way of thinking, it made — and makes — perfect sense that we’ve already done damage to the planet that’s showing up as increasingly severe weather and unpredictable climate patterns, so who’s working on making sure we don’t die or starve or drown or burn when that happens?
As the years have passed, adaptation and resilience have increasingly become a climate justice issue, as well. The parts of the world experiencing the most extreme impacts of climate change are often the parts that have done the least to contribute to global warming, and have the fewest resources to tackle rising seas, worsening storms, and dying crops.
And also, in this exact moment, the fact is that some of the conversations about adaptation are, in fact, surrender. At Davos in January, conversations that used to be about reducing emissions and slowing warming were, instead, about coping and rebuilding and surviving and turning to nature for solutions. Some of this is welcome, of course—a realization that climate change is no longer a problem we can punt to future generations.
On the other hand, some told Politico exactly what it really is.
“It’s middle ground, to avoid confrontation with Trump,” said Nicolás Galarza, a former deputy minister of the environment in Colombia.
So I embark on these next episodes with some fatalism, some trepidation, some apocalyptic optimism, as Dana Fisher might say. Because whatever the grim realities that have turned our focus to adaptation, let’s let it also be an area for creativity and momentum, since the scale of the task is immense and the potential outcomes are so tremendously significant.
There has been a massive funding and attention gap around adaption, and as is our way here, let’s flip the script from gaps and obligations to innovation and opportunity.
My guest in episode 123 is Niall Murphy, co-founder and managing partner of Morphosis, a unique investment firm that’s aggregating capital to invest in commercially viable adaptation opportunities — ie, figure out how to get the private sector involved because there are real returns to be had.
Today, roughly 90% of adaptation funding is public money, which is a problem because the need is growing faster than governments can keep up. Niall makes the case that climate impacts look a lot like emerging markets and investable opportunities, from solar-filtering polymers to micro-scale desalination.
And of course, we talk about insurance — the reality that might be the tipping point we have been waiting for.
Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!
Recommended reading
CES is legendary for vaporware announcements, and therefore it was with appropriate skepticism that folks received an announcement of a potentially completely game-changing battery technology from Donut Labs. From Electrek:
The Holy Grail of Energy Storage
Consider the implications. A battery that lasts 100,000 cycles is effectively immortal in human terms. You could charge it every single day for 270 years, and it would still be working. It means the battery outlives the vehicle, not just once, but ten times over. It changes the economics of transportation entirely: you buy the battery once, and you swap it into your next five cars.
The power density required for a 5-minute charge and the 400 Wh/kg of energy density opens the door to commercial electric aviation, a sector currently strangled by the weight and slow charging speeds of lithium-ion. It solves the grid storage problem by offering a medium that doesn’t degrade, meaning utility companies could amortize the cost over a century rather than a decade.
If this is real, the internal combustion engine didn’t just die today; it was buried 100 feet deep, and every other battery is not far behind. But, and this is a massive “but”, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Donut Lab has yet to release that proof.
Well, as I’m writing this, Donut Labs has revealed … what would we call it. Micro-proof? Part of proof? The company announced that it charged the battery cell from 0-80% in 4.5 seconds, as tested by Finland’s state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre. Unfortunately, it got so hot (which Donut had claimed wouldn’t be an issue) that they had to pause the testing, and these results don’t prove anything about the energy density that might enable electric airplanes, or the 100,000 promised cycles.
We’ll keep watching. I’d much rather watch the familiar CES/tech industry overpromising/astonishing founder hubris story unfold on tech that could bury dinosaur juice forever than on like, yet another tiny laptop, you know?
On a wildly different note
I’ve recently learned about Hilma af Klint, the Swedish surrealist painter who might have been Western civilization’s first abstract artist, who was deeply immersed in the occult and spirituality but also botany, science, and a love for the natural world. She literally had a coven of fellow artists who engaged in religious study and also seances. She created her first abstract paintings at age 44, and created work so wildly inventive and provocative and intense that she directed it not even be shown for 20 years after her death (which was in 1944). In fact, it wasn’t even displayed publicly for the first time until 1986. Anyway. I’m obsessed and I hope you take a moment to be slightly obsessed as well, because, well, sometimes we just need art.
